THE SHOT I GOT Golden Gardens Park features a protected wildlife pond area. After taking all the photos of sleeping Mallards and turtles I could handle (a very slow day indeed), I set off toward my car, when I noticed a set of spider webs in the bushes to the right of the trail. One […]

After finally cleaning my hard drive, I’ve got the stats for the photos I’ve taken over the past year at Echo Lake near our apartment complex: at least 32 species of birds. Not bad for a once or twice a week local excursion. I’ve come a ways since thinking all ducks were Mallards, and all […]

I took several photos at the Rainier Beach Urban Farm project, at several different levels of scale, from entire greenhouses, to rows of pumpkin or squash runners apparently vying for the longest reach, and even clusters of neatly arranged seedlings in a box. And then this first swelling of a future squash or pumpkin beneath […]

Urban greenery, in parks, gardens, and sheltered pathways, turns the experience of the city inside out. For some city dwellers, everything “outdoors” is for getting from one place to another place in as little time as possible; we mostly are “passing through” on the way to someplace else. Yet once in a while, we get […]

I kept watching for this moment to take a picture of the Peace sign that had been marking the progress of the prayer walk through Rainier Beach, sometimes leading from the front, other times lingering further back. Here, the sign stands in respect, bathed in the light of a setting sun, anchored in the silence […]

This curbside memorial, in all its exuberant chaos of blossoms, balloons, toys and statuettes, represents for me the awakening of the sacred in space, just as the church bell represents the emergence of the sacred in time. This is where it happened, where two lives were prematurely cut off. And this is where the community […]

Something about the make-shift assembly of this particular sign caught my eye. The neighborhood had been blanketed with the “branded” poster at the top of the photo, but this entire configuration displayed an ad hoc flow of imagination with a passion for capturing the attention of any and all passing by. The “branded” poster has […]

Church bells and carillons are the legacy of times past, when the rhythms of worship and prayer structured the lives of the surrounding community as a reminder of what time it is now, and what we are called to do with the time we have. And those same bells would interrupt routines in alarm or […]

Here are a few overall musings on the Liberating Voices Pattern Language and Civic Engagement, based primarily on conversations that occurred during and after the series of workshops I conducted at The Evergreen State College over the past two years, while also drawing upon my experience in community development with the Institute of Cultural Affairs […]

This posting is something of a dedication for the new series of articles under the category of “Inner Voices,” which I have introduced in another posting as a music-based, rather than psychological, metaphor for a vital aspect of emerging community. I’m not even going to try to be rigorously consistent in my observations at this […]